The circular enclosure, roughly 37 metres across, is defined by a stony bank and an outer fosse, the type of earthen ditch typically associated with a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period. But large stones still sitting in the interior, along with traces of a boulder revetment at the base of the bank, suggest an older origin. The possibility raised in the literature is that the whole structure is a modified prehistoric kerbed cairn, a burial monument originally edged with a ring of upright or recumbent stones, later reworked into something that reads, at least superficially, as a ringfort.

The suggestion of a prehistoric cairn beneath or behind the current form of the site was noted by Price in 1934, and it remains unresolved. The enclosure sits about 200 metres south-west of the summit of Golden Hill, on a gently south-west-facing slope, and its layout has a few features worth noting. There are two causeways crossing the fosse, one to the north-east and a broader one to the south-east, with a corresponding gap in the bank at the north-east. The north-east entrance is fairly standard for ringforts, which were often oriented towards the rising sun, but the wider south-east causeway, measuring around 12 metres across, is a less typical detail and adds to the sense that the site's history is not entirely straightforward. Whether the causeways belong to the same phase of construction, or represent successive modifications across different periods, is not something the surface evidence can settle.